peterms

10 hours ago, BOF said:

I got bottom middle in a Detroit airport bar once, for a fairly eye-watering price too (>$8).  Tried to convince me that's how the Irish drink it... yeah we got that fixed in the end.

I'm trying to think why an Irishman would order Guinness in an airport bar in Detroit.  Homesickness?  Filming a documentary?  Performing a Dadaist sketch?  Surely not in expectation of a decent pint.

17 minutes ago, cyrusr said:

Ruth Davidson pledges to SKINNY DIP

May involve fasting.

18 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

One of the very few things I support from Boris's list of pie in the sky promises would be privatising the BBC

No, it needs to be saved.  That will require a change of governance as well as staff.

26 minutes ago, hippo said:

Rumours the postal votes look very bad for labour.

I think we could have something close to a Tory landslide. A majority of 70 for Boris wouldn't be a surprise for me.

PVs are always better for the tories, because postal voters tend to be older, more likely to be unable to get to the polling station and so on.  It's not a new thing.

For the predictions, it feels even more uncertain than usual, to me.  As well as the normal difficulty in making predictions when there are lots of new people coming on to the register with an unknown or incompletely known propensity to vote, and the (possible) difficulty of predictive models developed incrementally over many years adjusting to a changing model of campaigning, there is also the further uncertainty of how Brexit will affect voting.  Will it override other factors, or not?

I see the forecasts as a bit of short-lived entertainment, and not to be taken too seriously.  But we'll soon see how well they have done.  Hung parliament, I would say.  And Swansong to be the first party leader to step down, possibly leaving trails of fingernail marks in the carpet in the process.  This may be a triumph of wishful thinking.

5 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I’ve also been shut in fridge with 3 members of the Sharks helicopter display team. That was quite a night.

Well don't leave it there, man!  We want the full story.

2 minutes ago, bickster said:

Someone didn't write the story you wanted them to write Peter, get over it

It's not about what I want them to write, it's that the way the story is written flies in the face of the very basics of reporting. 

3 minutes ago, bickster said:

It's pretty easy to argue that they've looked at more sources than you want them to. You've not once mentioned the LibDems in these exchanges, yet they are probably worse than the Tories

It's not about what extra sources they have looked at, and it's not about what the Libdems do with their daft barcharts.  It is about the decision to present an utterly striking difference reported by the study in the way they reported it.  It is about the editorial choice made by the BBC in respect of how this specific story has been covered.

This is not a difficult concept to grasp.  Trying to divert this simple point into being instead about your perceptions of what I would like to see, is odd.

3 minutes ago, bickster said:

But that wasn't what the BBC story was about, it looked at a wider picture. You want the article to be about point A only, it;s about points A,B, C...

I have no problem with them covering extra points as well.  What I am saying is that in an article about misleading information, a finding that one party has presented over 5,000 misleading pieces and the other party none, is such an obvious, glaring, central and newsworthy issue that to bury it under these ancillary points as they did cannot be  a normal news presentation (which would have been more like the way ITV covered it), but can only be a deliberate decision to stifle it.  The headline compounds it by talking in general terms about party communications being misleading - the old, old false equivalence game again.

This is so blindingly obvious I can't understand why you don't see it.  It is a case of going easy on the government by not highlighting the astonishing finding of the study.  Presumably this was done out of timidity and fear of retribution rather than love for the tories, but it's unacceptable in any event.

13 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

I know it's The Mirror, but this is amazing.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-boris-johnson-hides-fridge-21070803

Surprised he didn't try to put the camera crew in his pocket.

There's no room, what with Kuenssberg and Peston already in there.

This is how journos are trained to present stories.

Key point in the standfirst (and whoever adds the headline reflects it), then subsidiary point, then proceed to detail.

It's absolutely basic.

Quote

88% of Conservative ads on Facebook 'misleading'

Thousands of Conservative ads include claims which Facebook’s own third party fact-checker, Full Fact, say are misleading, according to a new investigation.

Despite this, the adverts are permitted to stay on the social media platform.

Analysis by a team from First Draft found 88% of ads posted recently by the Conservatives contained content that has already been deemed misleading by Full Fact. Some of the adverts included questionable content while others linked directly to a webpage with misleading claims...

5 hours ago, bickster said:

This is another of those stories that is getting lumped in with the rest of the BBC bias stories to add to the pile, I don't think it deserves to be in the pile. Are any of the facts stated wrong? Does it favour any one party? I think the answer to both questions is no.

Journalists are trained to identify the key points of a story, and to present them prominently, early in the story, before readers lose interest.  This was so decades ago when Harold Evans wrote his seminal work on journalism, and it's even more the case now that the internet has brought many competing sources, and reduced attention spans still further.

In a story about misleading ads, the discrepancy between several thousand from one party and none from the other is very obviously a key point, a staggering imbalance, and clearly newsworthy.  This would be so even if the issue of whether the tories can be trusted had not become a theme of the campaign, which as everyone and especially journaliists covering these issues knows, is one very prominent theme.

This piece of information was buried.  As another journo commented, you have to get past the headline, the standfirst, and 18 paras before discovering it.  Including other information doesn't mean the piece is balanced - it's the use of other and less dramatically newsworthy information ro submerge the key point that is in fact the cause for concern.

I don't believe the author failed to understand the importance, significance or relevance of the point in question.  Neither do I think he has forgotten the very basic principles of how ro write a story, because it would be hard to see how he could hold down the job if that were so.

I don't suppose it is naked political bias and the journo is a tory activist.  I'm more inclined to think it's the BBC wanting to softpedal, avoid criticism from the government (especially with threats about the licence fee being aired this week), and not cause a stir.  That is a problem.

It seems like a failure of journalism on quite a basic level, and one more example to add to a growing pile of concerns about how the BBC is managing its reporting of politics and this election.

1 hour ago, tonyh29 said:

Tories have a policy to give an extra £18.2 bn  for the NHS

 

over to you 

 

That'll be the additional cost they want to pay for the same drugs as now.

4 minutes ago, bickster said:

So they've combined two different pieces of relevant work into one story. Sorry, this isn't one of those biased stories.

The point being made is that the article states that 88% (5,952) of Conservative ads, and no Labour ads, were found to be false or misleading; and the headline presented the issue as being that political ads in general are misleading.

If you don't think that is a slanted presentation, I find that astonishing.

5 minutes ago, bickster said:

That tweet is more misleading than a LibDem Bar chart. For once I think that story is reasonably balanced. Why isn't he telling you that more LibDem adverts were flagged than Tory and whilst Labours figure was lower, it did have some

What he's referencing is this work looking at facebook ads and seeing which were found to be misleading, here.

It looked at several thousand ads.  It is a different piece of work from the total of 31 that were "flagged", which doesn't seem to indicate whether they were identified for review or found to be untruthful.

Quote

It looked just at every paid-for Facebook ad from the three main UK-wide parties run over the first four days of December:

    for the Conservatives, it said that 88% (5,952) of the party's most widely promoted ads either featured claims which had been flagged by independent fact-checking organisations including BBC Reality Check as not correct or not entirely correct. The figure includes instances of the same claims being made across multiple posts. One example was that Labour would spend £1.2 trillion at a cost of £2,400 to every household, which was contained within 4,028 ads. Those sums are significantly higher than others' analysis of Labour's plans
    for the Lib Dems, it said hundreds of potentially misleading ads had featured identical unlabelled graphs, with no indication of the source data, to claim it was the only party that could beat either Labour, the Conservatives or the SNP "in seats like yours"
    for Labour, it said that it could not find any misleading claims in ads run over the period. However, it noted that the party's supporters were more likely to share unpaid-for electioneering posts than those of its rivals. It said one of these contained leader Jeremy Corbyn's disputed claim that a Tory-negotiated trade deal with the US could cost the NHS up to £500m a week by driving up the cost of medicines

Can't link the tweet itself, it contains a word which the site rules don't approve of.

7 minutes ago, Risso said:

I'm possibly being hopelessly naive here, but..... we've all seen the video, but the bloke who walked into the arm might not have seen exactly what happened.  If all he felt was the bloke's arm in the side of his head and some shouting, is it possible that he thought he'd been hit on purpose?

That sounds unlikely.  He had just been speaking with (or was being spoken to by) the cyclist when they were both standing still, before the cyclist turns away.  It looks like he was just moving past him and didn't expect the armwaving to be repeated, so had to dodge.  He then gives the cyclist a look, kind of "Watch what you're doing" rather than the reaction of someone who believes he has been assaulted.

1 minute ago, bickster said:

Not sure what the problem is with this one. It's not an official BBC Account and its a retweet. I think we've gone beyond everyone having to put "retweets not an endorsement" in their twitter bio haven't we? And it's not Maitlis saying Cult of Corbyn anyway

I assume she was retweeting praise of herself, as some people like to do, and hadn't thought too much about the rest of the tweet.  The problem is that by doing so, she may be perceived as endorsing the "cult" line, probably didn't mean to do so, and didn't really think about it.  It looks sloppy rather than malicious, to me.

12 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

I'm glad you raised this because it was exactly the event that sprung to my mind  .. for some reason the reaction was entirely different and facts and proof weren't important  then

Journalists are to blame , but peoples wiliness to believe  everything without thinking is equally  to blame 

I think the reaction was different because the situation was different.  At the tory conference, it is reported that there was a scuffle, described as "handbags".  Because it involved trying to enter a secure area, security procedures were triggered, part of the venue was locked down for 20-30 minutes, and police and paramedics were called.  The MP was sent home, which rather suggests more was involved than simply being pompous and challenging the staff who prevented entry.

In the Leeds incident, an entirely false story was generated in order to direct attention away from the issue of the child lying on the floor, and it was repeated and amplified to millions without even the most basic verification being done, by very experienced journalists.

These situations are not comparable.

11 minutes ago, cyrusr said:

National Prediction: Conservative short 4 of majority

Party	2017 Votes	2017 Seats	Pred Votes	Gains	Losses	Net Change	Pred Seats
CON	43.5%	318	42.8%	7	3	+4	322
LAB	41.0%	262	35.8%	2	12	-10	252
LIB	7.6%	12	11.9%	2	1	+1	13
Brexit	0.0%	0	3.0%	0	0	+0	0
Green	1.7%	1	2.0%	0	0	+0	1
SNP	3.1%	35	3.7%	6	0	+6	41
PlaidC	0.5%	4	0.5%	0	1	-1	3
UKIP	1.9%	0	0.0%	0	0	+0	0
Other	0.7%	0	0.2%	0	0	+0	0
N.Ire		18		0	0	+0	18

Given that even the DUP don’t want to work with the Tories, only a total screw over by the Lib Dem’s would mean this isn’t a hung parliament. That might mean a referendum on Tory deal vs Remain but otherwise a non-functioning government, again. 

The DUP will support the tories, I think.

But the polls are very difficult to read.  I wouldn't want to be a pollster right now.